On Thursday, July 19, the Kalmanovitz Initiative co-hosted a luncheon entitled Regulating from Below, which highlighted the role Bank Workers can have in Bargaining for the Common Good

On Thursday, July 19, the AFL-CIO, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the CWA, the Committee for Better Banks, Rutgers’ Center for Innovation in Worker Organization, and the Kalmanovitz Initiative hosted a discussion on the importance of organizing bank workers. The event featured introductory remarks from the KI’s Director Joseph McCartin and Sara Burke from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, followed by an overview of Bargaining for the Common Good presented by KI fellow Stephen Lerner and Lisa Donner from Americans for Financial Reform and a panel discussion featuring organizers, bank employees, and union staff members who have been deeply engaged in this work.

Stephen Lerner, Lisa Donner, and Joseph McCartin all highlighted how the campaign to organize bank workers is a quintessential example of unions responding with offensive action in the wake of the Janus decision and Bargaining for the Common Good. Instead of going on the defensive, unions can tackle seemingly impossible targets like Wells Fargo and other financial giants to earn just working conditions for their employees and protect community members from predatory financial practices. All three speakers emphasized how organized bank workers can fight for working conditions and compensation systems that don’t force them to enact predatory sales practices against consumers, thereby reducing the burden large financial institutions can place on working communities.

All five members of the panel emphasized the importance and difficulty of organizing bank workers in an age of increasing financialization and inequality. Meggan Halvorson, an employee at Wells Fargo, spoke about how “the compensation system is not good for employees or consumers.” Reflecting on her experiences as an employee, she discussed how she “started suffering from severe anxiety and migraines” when she started working there. When she informed her therapist, “she sighed and said most of her clients work there too. The problem is systemic.” Shanon Bade and Arnise Porter, organizers with the Committee for Better Banks, discussed the scare tactics used by banks to discourage employees from unionizing and reiterated how their compensation system is used to “create animosity between employees and undermine solidarity.”

Molly McGrath, a growth strategies researcher for the AFL-CIO, commented on the innovative strategy behind the idea of “regulating from below,” and compared financial practices in the U.S. to those in countries where bank workers are organized, noting that these countries have notable reductions in inequality and predatory banking abuses. Graham Steele, a financial regulation expert, discussed how policymakers and regulators have failed to address underlying issues since the 2008 financial crisis: “Policymakers throw their hands in the air about how to measure ‘bank culture’ and oversee these practices. There’s a simple solution: talk to the workers who are on the ground experiencing these issues first hand.” Brandon Rees, Deputy Director of the AFL-CIO’s Office of Investment, offered hope by sharing some of the progress that has been made in organizing bank workers: “Employees under the NLRA have the right to challenge their working conditions, including the compensation structure that exploit both workers and consumers, without being retaliated against. Educating bank workers about this right has been enormously empowering in challenging the injustices we see at financial institutions like Wells Fargo.”

A recent article in The American Prospect provides more information on how Bank Workers can fight against their employers toxic practices, and Market Watch covered a sister event held in New York City.

Below are a handful of the pictures taken throughout the event by Alex Taliadoros and Julian Brunner

On Tuesday, November 28, the Kalmanovitz Initiative and Georgetown’s Prisons and Justice Initiative co-hosted a panel discussion entitled Prison Labor: Reform or Abolish?

Chaired by Marc Howard, Professor of Government and Law, this timely gathering touched upon an enormous segment of the workforce whom are largely hidden from public view. Besides cleaning, cooking, and doing the laundry within prisons themselves, many are leased out to state owned or private companies where they may be manufacturing a highly diverse array of products including clothing, processed foods, office supplies, license plates, and even American flags, often for less than $2 per day. During the recent California wildfires, as many as forty percent of the firefighters that were drafted in to beat back the flames would have listed a prison as their present residence.

A diverse panel represented a range of different perspectives. Chandra Bozelko served six years at York Correctional Institute in Connecticut and is now an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Guardian, and National Review. She now blogs about her experiences at Prison Diaries. When she was first directed to wake up at 3.30am and work in the kitchen at York she considered refusing, but risked being placed in solitary confinement and losing access to extracurricular activities if she did so. Over time she found some value in this role though, and saw that it created an established working routine for some who had never experienced one before. “It humbled me and it taught me and many other inmates how to work hard though.”

Like Bozelko, fellow-panelist Sekwan Merritt found that the minimal wages provided in prison made it very difficult to afford human necessities though. Merritt was sentenced in 2012 to 25 years for possession with intent to distribute of 2.4 grams of heroin. He was successful in appealing his case and was recently released from Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland. While there he learned the skills required to construct furniture for Maryland Correctional Enterprises, the state prison system’s profitable manufacturing arm. “In prison, we wake up early and bust our tail for 30 cents an hour. We need to do it because that’s the only way we can afford access to basic goods like deodorant in commissary. At the same time, the companies that employ us as inmates are making billions in profit,” he said. Merritt would arise at 4am and eat dinner at 4pm, meaning that he was dependent upon his earnings to purchase any supplementary food for the intervening twelve-hour period. He now works as an electrician.

David Fathi is the Director of the National Prison Program at the ACLU and has for a long time been one of the strongest legal and moral voices for improving conditions and inmate’s rights in American prisons. He sees the present conditions facing prisoners as part of the historical legacy of exploiting African-American workers that stretches back before the Civil War. Many rights that protect American workers are stripped from the incarcerated. “They are not covered by minimum wage laws, worker’s compensation, health and safety protections, or even disability laws,” he pointed out, warning, “there is great danger of exploitation.” There are many internationally agreed upon standards that could be applied, Fathi said. “We can look to guidance from the United Nations, which adopted the Nelson Mandela Principles in 2015. The basic principle is that prisoners should have access to the same protections as other workers.”

Arthur Rizer is the National Security and Justice Policy Director at the R Street Initiative, a free-market think tank here in Washington, DC. Prior to this he was a decorated army veteran, a former police officer and federal prosecutor, and he has also taught law at West Virginia University and Georgetown. “There is no doubt that people of color are mistreated by our criminal justice system,” he said. Rizer went on to argue that, “part of our social compact involves punishment for crimes. If people will be incarcerated, labor can greatly reduce recidivism and provide valuable vocational training for inmates.” Rizer stressed his belief that wages were not necessarily the fundamental problem, but that the monopoly enterprises, like telephone operators that exist within prisons for example, often take advantage of inmates. The legal barriers that exist for returning citizens compound this inequity. “It doesn’t offend me that the inmates fighting fires in California only made $2 a day,” he said. “What offends me is that these individuals are not able to find jobs after their sentence with the skills they’ve acquired,” he continued, referring to the fact that many fire services exclude applicants with criminal records. “They’re being locked out from the American dream,” Rizer concluded.

Relive the event through photos taken by the talented Derrick Arthur-Cudjoe.

How can working people build power today when organizing a union is so difficult? That question was at the heart of a KI roundtable discussion on strategic twenty-first century worker organizing with AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Elissa McBride, Jobs with Justice Organizing Director Erica Smiley, and KI Associate Director Lane Windham. The springboard for the panel discussion was Windham’s new book, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide, just released from UNC Press on Labor Day.

Windham told the group of about forty attendees how the book grew out of her experience as a union organizer among clothing and textile workers in the South; she organized alongside McBride in the 1990s. Her efforts to uncover how union organizing became so arduous took her to the pivotal decade of the 1970s, when women and people of color powered a previously unseen wave of union organizing. Employers ramped up their resistance to organizing in this decade and took advantage of weak labor law, thus turning back workers’ surge of unionizing efforts and helping to hasten the nation’s economic divide.

McBride drew a line from private-sector employers’ fierce resistance to workers’ organizing to current right-wing efforts to roll back public sector union membership levels, efforts that KI Director Joseph McCartin posits may mark a watershed moment for the labor movement. Using a soccer analogy, Smiley urged today’s unions to work as a team with “alt-labor” organizations that also focus on building workplace power. Smiley pointed out that Knocking on Labor’s Door details an example of how women office workers built such a tandem model through the 9to5 association in the 1970s. During a recent KI forum, Jane Fonda credited 9to5 as the inspiration for her blockbuster 1980 movie, Nine to Five.

McCartin’s advance praise for the book captures its significance:

“Lane Windham takes a fresh look at a phenomenon that many of us thought we understood – – the decline of U.S. trade unionism. With meticulous research and graceful prose, she challenges our outworn perceptions. Her narrative of labor’s recent past deepens our understanding of its present challenges and helps us imagine its future. Rarely have I felt as great an urge to stand up and cheer when reading a work of history as I did while reading this one.”

You can see glimpses of the event in this tweet thread and the photos below, courtesy of David Gomez.

On Tuesday, July 18, the Kalmanovitz Initiative hosted a luncheon discussion on a fundamental challenge facing working people in America: retirement security. More specifically, the event focused on the enormous fees paid to Wall Street fund managers who invest workers’ pensions in risky alternative assets such as private equity and hedge funds. These fees were highlighted in a groundbreaking report from the American Federation of Teachers, whose author Elizabeth Parisian shared that workers stand to gain billions of dollars if these fees are slashed. As Maurice Weeks from the Action Center on Race and the Economy pointed out, each dollar that goes to Wall Street financiers comes at the expense of working families largely from communities of color.

We were encouraged to hear from AFT President Randi Weingarten that their union is taking on exorbitant Wall Street fees by working with pension funds to expose the worst systemic actors and close the carried interest tax loophole. Eileen Appelbaum from the Center on Economic and Policy Research offered valuable insights regarding how private equity and hedge funds often fail to deliver the high returns that are promised and cloak the true rate of return from investors altogether. KI Director Joseph McCartin offered introductory remarks and facilitated the discussion between the panelists and audience members.

Those interested in joining the effort to reduce the fees that have compromised worker retirement security and crippling state budgets can take the following steps:

Share AFT’s report with their union leadership, pension fund trustees, group membership, or elected elected officials.

Request complete alternative investment fee data from pension funds that they participate in or engage.

Invite the event’s panelists to meet with members of their union, organization, or speak at an upcoming meeting.

Students are the lifeblood of the Kalmanovitz Initiative. Never was that more clear than on April 21 when the 2017 KI Undergraduate Research Conference took place. The conference was envisioned and planned by a student, featured exclusively student research, and all panelists and moderators were current Georgetown University undergraduate students. The insights on activism and organizing that students shared speak to their incredibly sophisticated and principled understanding of solidarity and struggle.

Allow us to share a reflection from conference organizer Vincent DeLaurentis (SFS ’17) and a selection of photos of the conference.

On Friday, April 21st, the Kalmanovitz Initiative hosted its inaugural Undergraduate Research Conference. The conference featured student work confronting the theme “Work, Organize, Struggle: Student Perspectives”. The day included panels addressing the topics of Envisioning Just Economies, States of Existence/States of Resistance, and Latinx Metropolitanisms. In addition to student work, the conference featured a keynote address by Dr. Donn Worgs of Towson University, whose remarks addressed his own experiences and critical reflections of working to combine an academic life with organizing and activism.

The conference was an exciting opportunity to recognize and highlight work completed by students that addressed themes of community solidarity, collective resistance, and radical scholarship, bringing together critical thought and some of the most pressing issues of our unique and unsettling political moment. I was personally impressed by how student presenters and moderators eschewed technocratic condescension and expressed democratic solidarity with people and communities in struggle. Throughout the day, students weaved together their own experiences as organizers, activists, and advocates and the work that they are completing in the classroom, bringing together nuanced reflections on their experiences and well-researched arguments. As Barbara Anne Kozee, a student presenter, stated, bringing together organizing and scholarship is important “to create a larger framework of how we can view community organizing — what worked, what didn’t work and what we can take into the future.”

Not only was the conference an important opportunity to hear student reflections, it was also a space in which to build an intellectual community dedicated to collective liberation. Student moderator Obed Ventura reflected, ““In all these cases, struggle means fighting the existing structure in order to create a better world for the marginalized among us and at times, ourselves. It also means demanding space in a world that often denies or distorts narratives of the oppressed.” As the conference organizer, I wanted the conference act as a space to build networks of radical intellectual solidarity and offer examples and resources to students who wish to expand the radical character of their academic work. I am optimistic that the conference helped to build networks that will spur an expansion of radical and critical scholarship by students on campus. I am excited to see what is to come from our presenters, moderators, attendees, and all other members of the intellectual community that surrounded and participated in the conference.

To conclude, I would like to thank the Kalmanovitz Initiative for recognizing the importance of this conference and for hosting the conference. I would also like to thank all of the student presenters and moderators for sharing their timely and passionate reflections. Dr. Donn Worgs is also owed my gratitude for his key note address, which offered concrete examples and helpful reflections on how students might combine thought and struggle. Finally, I would like to thank the conference attendees for investing their time in building a critical intellectual community dedicated to collective liberation. We look forward to seeing everyone at the conference next year!

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Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor develops creative ideas and practical solutions for working people that are grounded in a commitment to justice, democracy, and the common good.Learn more